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Originally Posted by kff
We had asked for a girl 18-24 months. What was your origional request for age? I would imagine with this slow down we would be able to get that age group, what is your feeling from just comming back from China or anybody else?
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I adopted Olivia through the Waiting Child program, so I didn't have an official age request. I saw her file for the first time when she was about 2 weeks away from turning 2 and I had not started any paperwork/home study/etc. so I knew it would take me close to a year to get it done. The WC program is a little different, so I had a lot of information about her before I even started the process.
I have heard that toddler referrals are getting more rare though. I traveled in a group of 14 families, 10 of them adopting through the NSN program. There were a few families that had requested a child up to 2 years and they received babies that were 10-12 months old. The youngest child of the 10 families in the NSN program was 8 months old and the oldest was 18 months. There were 4 WC families and the ages of those children were 1 year, 2- 2 year olds and Olivia at almost 3.
From what I understand, there are not as many "paper ready" toddlers due to the fact that most SWI's are processing younger children through the NSN program so when a request comes in for a child over 2, there isn't always one available. I think that this is due to the fact that there is a general preference for AYAP, but that's just my opinion. That being said, it is not to say there aren't any toddlers available, but the way that matching happens (at least as it has been explained to me) is that there is a batch of files from an agency that is a "group" and those files are matched with a group of files from a particular province or if very large the group may be split into 2 groups. If you are with a large agency and part of a big DTC group, chances are you will received a child from one of the more active regions (Hunan, Jiangxi) because they will have a larger number of children available for a large DTC group. For example, the 10 families in the NSN program in my travel group all had children from the Hunan province. Of these children, 7 came from one SWI, 2 from another and 1 baby from another. Since all adoptions are processed in the capital city of the province, these families were all able to travel together even though their children were from 3 different SWI's. Conversely, if you are from a smaller agency with a smaller DTC group the Matching Room will have a bit more flexibility in terms of matching you with your child. There are several provinces and smaller SWI's that process a fewer number of children a year. Based on what I have learned just by reading up on adoption over the past few years it seems that these smaller SWI's are a bit more likely to process a slightly older child for adoption. This is again just my opinion, but it makes sense that a smaller SWI that has fewer "slots" in the International Adoption program would select the best and brightest children and they may sometimes have to wait until the child is older to have an available slot for them. (There is a limit to the number of children that can be made available to the International Adoption and each SWI that is eligible for IA is given a certain number of "slots" each year.) I'm not sure if that helps answer your questions, but I hope it helped a little! There will always be a little bit of mystery to how things are done, but speculation can be made if you're around long enough and read a lot of blogs/boards. :-)
Thanks for all your kind words...we are very happy together and Olivia is the perfect match for me. She is a blessing for sure!